


Dance in the Graveyards

by ReaperWriter



Series: These Lines Across My Face [8]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Everyone Dies but in a Soft Way, F/F, Going Home, M/M, Psychopomps, Reunions, Stepping Into the Afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26655952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: Psychopomp- A Guide of Souls to the Place of the Dead.***When each of the Guard meets their final death, there's someone there to meet them and take them home.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: These Lines Across My Face [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852702
Comments: 16
Kudos: 146





	Dance in the Graveyards

**Author's Note:**

> I thought this series was done. I thought I had said good-bye. And then my muse was like, there's one more story here.
> 
> The title of this one comes from the song of the same title by Delta Rae. You can see the video here: https://youtu.be/lPOM0IUsd_0

Andromache the Scythian, called Andy, oldest immortal, leader of the Old Guard, whose life extends beyond recorded human time, dies from a lucky shot in, of all places, Belarus, in a forest under the stars. Hair gone grey, wrinkles and age spots, she falls one last time.

She wakes in that same forest, gasping to life like she has a million times before, but the gun battle has gone quiet and dark. Everything has gone quiet. Only the wind rustles the trees. Andy rises, but her team is nowhere. The enemy is nowhere. She stands alone.

Or, not quite alone.

“Andromache.”

She freezes, eyes closing tight. She hasn’t heard that voice in centuries. Over a millennium. She’s dreaming. Clearly. 

She opens her eyes, and there he is. His skin dark as burnished mahogany and his smile just as blinding. But no blood. No pain in his eyes. Just joy and love and home. 

“Lykon.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“And I you. How are you here?”

“I’ve come for you, Andromache. It’s time to go home.”

Oh. _Oh_. Not dreaming then. Dead. “Shit. Gwyn and Nile were right. There is an afterlife.”

“There is.” Lykon holds out a hand. “Come. We should go.”

Andromache takes Lykon’s hand, and the world goes white.

***

Quỳnh dies saving the woman they’re rescuing, using her body as a shield. The bullets take her quickly. There isn’t any pain. She’s gone before she hits the floor of the warehouse, before the rest of the team returns fire, killing the last of the kidnappers. They free the wife of the nuclear scientist they came for. Booker carries Quỳnh’s body out when they go.

Quỳnh wakes on the cold concrete, blinking back to life. The shells of the gunfight are gone. The chair with it’s chains where Marika, their target had been, has disappeared too. There’s no blood, no bodies. Just the smell of dust and industrial cleaners and eerie quiet.

She narrows her eyes, rising quickly and reaching for her knives.

“Hello, beloved.”

Quỳnh turns and throws before the words register, but Andromache ducks aside, the knife sailing past her. She stands tall and proud, her hair once more dark, her face unlined. And her smile. Oh, her smile.

“My heart?” Quỳnh breathes.

“We fought well, and now it’s time to be done.” Andromache walks toward her. “Come. Lykon is waiting.”

“Lykon?” It’s too much. Tears fill Quỳnh’s eyes, stream down her cheeks. 

Andromache holds her arms open and Quỳnh rushes into them, wrapping her own around her lover tight. The world goes white. 

***

The shot to her thigh will kill her. She’s bleeding out slowly, and unless someone was coming to medivac her to the refugee camp at the southern border, she’s only got maybe half an hour. Forty five minutes tops. There’s an odd peace in that. If she can keep these men here, keep them talking, she’ll give the children a chance. 

When the President...the dictator...a man whom she’s spoken to about his own son’s language lessons...steps to the side with his side-arm drawn, Gwyn has a moment to look up, look into the drone watching. Look at the others. They’ll see it. Hell, the whole world will see it. She’ll make the history books. She smiles, closing her eyes. The gun goes off.

She shudders awake on the plain where she died, confused. Her leg had been bleeding. Her hand took days to heal. Lifting it now, she finds the scar gone.

“Damn,” she mutters softly. As loathe as she was to leave her family, exhaustion had weighed on her these last twenty years. A sense of a final act, a curtain closing had dogged her. But she must be wrong.

Pushing herself up, she blinks. The trucks are gone. The blood under her is gone. She’s alone here. Touching her face, her hand comes back clean.

“Hello, mum.”

She turns. Ioan stands there, handsome and bright with his fiery red hair, looking like he did not long after he married Evain. Happy. Alive. Not ravaged by the cancer that. That…

“Ioan. Oh, my sweet boy.” Tears stream down her face. “How are you…?”

“I’m here to take you home, Mum.”

She laughs, just a little. “I’m not sure you’re who I was expecting.”

“I won the lottery for it. There was a fair bit of competition.”

Oh. “What do we need to do?”

“Just take my hand.”

Like she did once before, when he was a lost little boy who needed to come home, she reaches for him. He clasps her hand tight, and the world goes white.

***

Humanity hasn’t burned out the earth, but they’ve outgrown it. And it was perhaps inevitable that where humanity went, they’d follow. So when this mission takes the six of them out into space, when the battle results in the need to blow this station, and that needs two pairs of hands who won’t be walking out of the station with them, it’s an easy choice.

Joe and Nicky are almost three thousand. It’s been a wonderful run. They’ve fought together, lived together, loved together. When the others are clear, when it’s just them in the echoing quiet of the station, surrounded by the dead they had killed to get this far, they each reach for a key, clasping their free hands. They share one last deep, lasting kiss. Then they turn the keys.

Joe and Nicky blink, and they’re back on the bridge, but the bodies are gone. The keys are gone. There’s only the sound of the life support system cycling air through the station. 

“What the fuck?” Joe mutters.

“Hello, little brothers.”

They turn, and it’s like a living memory. Two women, dressed as warriors. Their hair is long, their clothes from an age so long gone, it’s like a dream. But their smiles. Oh, their smiles.

“Andromache,” Nicky whispers, at the same time Joe gasps, “Quỳnh?”

“Are you ready for your next adventure?” Andromache asks.

“Is the afterlife Valhalla?” Nicky mutters, brow furrowing. “I’m not sure I want to go to Valhalla.”

“The afterlife is what we make of it. Sometimes we spar for fun. Sometimes we just let Gwyn make us ridiculous amounts of food. Sometimes we listen to Lykon tell us stories.” Quỳnh smiled. “It’s quite nice.”

“Lykon? Gwyn?”

“They’re waiting,” Andromache offers, inclining her head behind them, and holding out her hand. “Everyone we’ve loved and lost is waiting. Are you coming?”

Quỳnh reaches out too.

Not letting go of each other, Joe and Nicky reach out, taking them. The world goes white.

***

There is an irony, Booker thinks, in being hung again. It’s not the first time since the first time. Not even the tenth. But it is certainly the first on a backwater planet, where he sacrificed himself to give the others a chance to get a couple of resistance leaders off world and clear to a transport. Nile will be back for him, he knows. He’s not even that concerned about it. But the fact this whole damn world has embraced old Zane Grey novels is just ridiculous. But at least they seem to know what they’re doing with the gallows. His head won’t get ripped clean off. Probably.

He wakes, standing in the middle of the street. The crowd is gone, the gallows empty of their rope. A rough wind blows dust down the street in a devil, swirling around his feet.

“Bonjour, Sébastien.”

He turns, and there she is. Her hair looks like it did all those centuries ago at the croft, after she grew it out and cut all the black out. The riot of copper brown curls around her face. A thick sweater over heavy work pants and riding boots, and the pendant she’d had him wear for years at her throat.

“Gwyn.” The name comes out almost silently as tears burn his eyes. He tries again. “Gwyn, is it...are you really here?”

“I promised I would be, remember? When your time came?”

Booker stops, then turns and scowls at the gallows. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’m sorry. The irony isn’t lost on me.” She moves, coming to stand beside him. “You did an amazing thing here, Sébastien.”

“I learned sacrifice from the best.” He shrugs. Then quietly. “My family.”

“They’re waiting. We get one Psychopomp each to lead us home. They thought it might be easier to see me first.” She offers him a soft smile. “They want to see you, Sébastien. Very, very much.”

He closes his eyes, the fear he’s been holding draining away. Gwyn has never been less than brutally honest with him. It’s why he loves her, his own saint.

“I have missed you so much, ma soeur.”

“And I you.” She turns to him, holding her arms wide. “Let’s go home. 

He wraps his arms around her tight, feeling her hug him back as the world goes white.

***

This must have been what it felt like to be Andy, Nile thinks. It's been millenia since she lost Quỳnh, over a millennium since Joe and Nicky. Half as long again since she came back and found Booker dead and buried in a goddamn boothill like they’ve gone back in time instead of forward.

And suddenly, she hadn’t been just the leader, she’d been the oldest. As they’d lost people, new immortals had come, and it had fallen to Nile, Olivia, and Kuari to teach them. 

But Nile is tired. So tired. She misses her first family, whose faces she still sees all these years later thanks to Joe, who drew them for her over and over to make sure she always had an image to look back on. And she misses her second. Betting on Baklava with Andy and Booker and Nicky. Listening to new music with Joe. Training with Quỳnh. Quiet discussions on faith and forgiveness with Gwyn. She has Joe’s sketches of them, too.

So when the bruise on her shin where she knocked it into a ladder rung doesn’t heal, it’s relief. Such relief. 

She only tells Olivia and Kauri. The new ones, the kids, will be their responsibility. Kauri is already the keeper of the swords, waiting for one of the kids to be worthy of one. Olivia will take the labrys when it’s time.

And it’s time. It’s time when a villain who reminds her so laughably of Merrick threatens a child and she doesn’t think, just throws herself at him. As they tumble over the edge of the cliff, Nile has only a moment to think, shit.

She wakes up sitting on the edge of the cliff, looking out over a canyon beyond anything from earth. It’s quiet. Peaceful. Not so bad.

“Hey kid.”

Nile laughs at Andy’s voice. “Hey Andy.”

“You made me proud.”

“Thanks.” Nile stands, turning to face her. Andy’s hair is dark and short, like it was that day in Afghanistan. She’s wearing the thin leather bracers and the black tank top, materials Nile hasn’t seen in she can’t recall how long. “So what now?”

“Now we go home. Your family is excited to see you. You ready?” Andy asks, holding out her hand.

Nile’s been following Andy’s lead for longer than Andy was in her life. She’s not about to stop now. “Yeah. I am.”

Her palm meets Andy’s. And the world goes white.


End file.
